Author: CSTonline

So the BBC has called time on its Digital Media Initiative (DMI), the project to create tapeless workflow and archive access: £98m in the hole for a software solution that can now be bought off the shelf for less than £1,000. A...

Byzantium, a vampire film that incorporates both period detail and contemporary era in its tale of a mother-daughter relationship, has just hit the big screen and I’ve been working on a conference paper about flashbacks in...

Even when you work as an assiduous researcher of television drama history, it’s rare that you make a genuinely major discovery, but watching Patricia Hooker’s 1973 Armchair Theatre play, ‘The Golden Road’, I had the tremendously...

When doing the research for my book on television branding I spent a lot of time in archives fast-forwarding through the carefully catalogued television programmes to view the junctions or interstitials in between. I was...

Futuristic TV images are fun to look at, whether the sets are depicted in splendid isolation or with asinine human faces as accompaniment. I like to look back and think about what was once thought of as the future as well as...

I return for this blog to the topic of neglected historical British television comedy.  In my last post, my focus was on the significance of female performers to the genre, with a retrospective of the comedy career of actress...

          Putting aside watching or re-watching TV shows via box sets, the shows I watch as they are broadcast fall into two tiers. The first is made up of series that are, to use a cliché, appointment...

The concept of prequels is not one that, on first consideration, sits easily in the television landscape. Given the serialised nature of so much modern television drama, which essentially hinges on keeping viewers hooked on what...

Forgive me for returning to Broadchurch so soon after John Ellis’s excellent account, written just as it finished. But I thought it was worth commenting on some of its other (largely textual) features before it slips away from...

Elementary (CBS 2012-). Arrow (CW 2012-). Game of Thrones (HBO 2011-).  These recent American television programmes are all based (to varying degrees) on texts rooted in cult appeal, around particular fan communities, and with...

It wasn’t something I deliberately set out to do.  It was a result of a combination of factors – a PhD to finish, lessons to plan, marking to do, the day-to-day demands of running a household.  Life, in short, getting in the way...

Last Monday, Britain invented television… all over again. A load of people watched the same programme at the same time, at the moment of first broadcast. At one point, 9.27 million people, 34.64% of the TV audience, was watching...

Guy Hibbert is no stranger to controversial drama. No Child of Mine – his rendering of an horrific real-life child abuse case brilliantly directed by Peter Kosminsky – was one of the most disturbing and moving...

I talked to a cab driver the day after Margaret Thatcher died. He was worried about congestion during her funeral the following Wednesday. Should he respect his birthday and take the day off, as planned, or cash in on the...

I have always been fascinated, perhaps even obsessed, with my eyes. I have often felt them looking into things, as if they had their own embodied consciousness that I was entirely, simultaneously, conscious of. It was as if we,...

In 1986, in a now infamous Saturday Night Live sketch, William Shatner told fans at a Star Trek convention to ‘Get a Life!’.   Drawing upon every cliché of the Trekkie, the sketch playfully mocks the obsessive and socially...

I do not intend all my blogs to be about 3D, but two days at the excellent 3D Creative Summit, organised by Ravensbourne, has provided a number of useful ideas on which to ruminate. For me, the event started off badly when Jim...

Even before its first episode was transmitted in April last year, The Undateables (Channel 4, 2012- ) polarised opinion. Promoted as ‘an uplifting… series [which] follows the journeys of several extraordinary singletons as...

I’m not a great sports fan. I enjoy the Olympics, tennis and darts when they happen to be on the telly, but I’ve never suffered the agonies and ecstasies of loyally supporting a particular team or following a specific sport....

Ricky Gervais’ sitcom Derek concluded its first season around the time Michael Haneke’s Amour won the Oscar for best foreign language film, and my viewing of both overlapped in a way that made comparison perhaps a bit more...

Who says that hearing voices is a bad thing?  As far as my television viewing habits go, I’ve been hearing them more frequently as of late, or, at least, I’ve been hearing those voice-overs that continue to characterize and add...

Today’s factual TV is all about formats: repeatable, exportable templates that can generate multiple episodes in a multitude of markets. Thanks to excellent collections of case studies like Tasha Oren and Sharon Sharaf’s Global...